Germans demand access to their Spanish holiday villas

GERMAN holidaymakers are asking to be allowed to use their Balearic Islands villas amid mounting tension over a lost holiday season across Europe.

Around 200 holiday homes owners have written to Francina Amengol, the islands’ president, calling for an exception to laws applied across the whole of Spain limiting movement to necessary trips to work and shops.

“This is a violation of the right to property,” wrote Frank Tober, arguing that Spain’s lockdown would cause “irreparable damage … if investors can no longer trust that their property is secure”.

It comes as it emerged some Germans and Italians had travelled to the islands, only to be turned away as they had no proof of permanent residency.

Many letter-writers have demanded Ms Armengol’s government give “immediate” permission for foreign owners to return to their properties and the opening of all leisure facilities such as golf courses as soon as the “exaggerated and barely constitutional,” state of emergency is lifted.

“We cannot understand that we pay very high taxes and still cannot come to the island to use our property,” wrote

Peter Kallmayer. The demands were met by counter-arguments by some German compatriots with connections to Majorca, sparking a war of words in the letters sections of local papers, including the German-language

newspaper.

“They put a higher value on the wellbeing and security of their own investments than on the health of the island’s population,” wrote Petra Goessler in a letter to the newspaper

“It makes me ashamed to be German,” said an unnamed woman from the Mallorcan town of Llucmajor.

Ms Armengol struck a more conciliatory tone in the 180 replies she said she had made to the letters, noting that the limits on travelling to second homes “are the same for everyone, regardless of their nationality”.

A spokesmann from Palma airport said the lockdown had not stopped foreigners attempting to travel to their holiday homes.